A tale of two leaders

By Aussiegirl

On November 15, 2001, President Putin visited the United States and was feted at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. He was riding high in the saddle at the time. It looked like Russia was entering the free world at last, democratizing, cooperating on the war on terror, and could easily become an ally and partner of the United States in a new post-Soviet world. This is the meeting where George Bush drove him around the ranch in his pickup truck and treated him to a Texas-style barbecue, and famously peered into his soul and found a religious and good man there.

What a difference a few years make. Since then Putin has increasingly reverted to type, falling back into bad old habits when the going got tough. A reflex of his old KGB days -- when in doubt -- do what you're familiar with. He has centralized his own power, cracked down on media in Russia, seized Yukos illegally and imprisoned its CEO and plans to sell off its assets. His mishandling of the Beslan massacre only led to a further power grab as he responded by suspending the local election of regional governors in a move to centralize power even further. His ham-handed attempt to interfere in the recent Ukrainian elections backfired severely when the extent of election fraud was revealed and the not too subtle cooperation between former President Kuchma and Putin was made plain. He has also attempted to bully Georgia, after it too rejected a Russian engineered fraudulent election and brought in its own democratic reformer in the so-called Rose Revolution. He's making deals with the Syrians, the Chinese and the Iranians, casting his lot with the usual suspects of anti-American and anti-Western despotic regimes. Old habits just die hard, it seems. But this is not your father's Soviet Union -- and things are not going quite according to plan.

He faces censure from abroad, as the United States has ordered a complete top to bottom review of policy towards Russia. Ukraine has moved decisively towards the EU and NATO and incorporation into European values, both democratic and economic. Ukraine is currently reconsidering whether or not to join the Common Economic Space, the common market of the former Soviet states. The new finance minister of Ukraine has announced that satisfying the requirements of the EU and also the CES would be mutually incompatible - and it is clear in which direction Ukraine is currently looking.

By contrast, Viktor Yushchenko has emerged triumphant as the new face of a democratic Eastern Europe, seeking incorporation into western European economic ties and diplomatic organizations. Yushchenko has wasted no time since his inauguration in instituting far-reaching reforms -- radical reforms, really. In a series of recent moves he has announced a variety of radical changes in established policy, from rooting out corruption and making sure all government officials disclose their personal finances, to reducing the role of the SBU to strictly security issues dealing with rooting out corruption. He has ordered that no longer will the SBU meddle in politics, and no more will it meddle in business. In addition the SBU has been instructed to stop meddling in foreign affairs and remove its agents from the Foreign Service -- these are agents working under diplomatic cover in foreign embassies -- but whose real job is spying. And in the case of these former Soviet countries, they are spying not only on the host nation, but on the employees of the embassies themselves -- the old "watchful eye" of communist time.

In a move to heal any misunderstandings that might arise over the planned withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Iraq, the foreign minister has pledged to visit Iraq himself, and to withdraw the troops only after consultation with the United States, and to gradually replace them with civilian advisors, consultants and diplomatic personnel. The question of Ukrainian troops in Iraq is a tricky one.
Originally the troops had been sent to Iraq by former president Kuchma, as a form of appeasement to the Bush administration which had threatened to cut off diplomatic and other relations with Ukraine after Kuchma was accused of dealing illegal arms to terrorist regimes. The troop assignment was extremely unpopular in Ukraine, and as a way of distancing himself from Kuchma during the campaign, Yushchenko had pledged to withdraw them. The new plan seems to be a compromise intended to satisfy both parties - the United States -- and his own campaign pledge. In any case, the contingent of Ukrainian troops was a specially trained unit specializing in the decomissioning of WMD -- something that it turned out was unnecessary as none were discovered. So their presence is moot from a practical standpoint, they are mostly symbolic as a token of Ukrainian willingness to cooperate. Ukraine has now stated its intention to seek cooperation with the United States in Iraq and in the war on terror.

Meanwhile, Putin is facing increasing unrest even in his own country from the "babushkas" (grandmothers) who formed the rock solid core of his support. When the government recently announced the end of various transportation subsidies, there were protests in the streets all over Russia as pensioners demanded their benefits back. We should not look at these demonstrations as proof that the old Soviet communist system made people lazy and dependent. Probably no other group was as severely hurt and dislocated as were the pensioners when Russia tried to reform its Soviet-style economy via a the so-called (and inadvisable) shock-therapy. The runaway inflation which followed wiped out the hard-earned life-savings of most Russians, and hit the pensioners especially hard, most of whom subsist on a few hundred rubles per month, barely enough for survival. The end of free or subsidized bus transport was an economic blow that just went too far.

So we have an instructive lesson in geopolitics. Choose the way of democracy, freedom, economic security and openness, cooperation with western democracies and the United States, or choose to hunker down in outdated Soviet-era bully tactics, alligning yourself with various rogue and terrorist regimes throughout the world. Putin aspires to become another mini-Soviet Union -- a world power once again in opposition to the United States. Losing Ukraine was a big blow to this ambition.

He hopes to make bed-fellows with other tyrants, increasingly huddled in their bomb-proof bunkers, issuing threats, blusters and intimidations. Meanwhile history is marching along, and is going to eventually leave him and his cohorts behind in the dust -- the dustbin of history as Ronald Reagan so vividly put it. He may make trouble in the short run, he may bluster and bluff and rattle his depleted sabers, but history is moving along without him. The dawn of the internet, of mass communication, of global trade, and a new willingness of the United States to promulgate a bold foreign policy of freedom, democracy and openness spells the end -- sooner or later. It's up to Putin which it will be.